Massachusetts Politics

If I were back in the newspaper business, I’d probably write a lead for this article containing the cliché, “Crime never takes a holiday.”   Yes, clichés are the first resort of lazy-minded and hurried scribes, but the good thing is, they're usually accurate.   So, with perfunctory apologies for interrupting your holiday cheer, I now present four separate accounts of public corruption in Massachusetts, which were all brought to culminations of sorts this month within a span of six days: Embezzlement at Housing Authority.   On Tuesday, December 13, Rosa A. Famania, age 33, of Milford, pleaded guilty to one count of embezzling money from an agency receiving federal funds.   That agency is the Framingham Housing Authority (FHA), where Famania was employed as an accounting assistant for five-and-a-half years. A press release from the Office of U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz states, “Between February 2014 and August 2015, Famania stole approximately 181 cash...

Carmen Ortiz’s term as U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts runs for only a few more weeks.   If she’s wishing it were over today, I’d understand.   The biggest case Ortiz ever handled as the state’s top federal prosecutor, the alleged conspiracy to rig the entire hiring system in the Massachusetts Probation Department in favor of politically connected candidates, has fallen to pieces. The second-guessing has begun. Lawyers all over town are saying: Why did she ever make a federal case out of patronage hiring on Beacon Hill?   This was never more than an Ethics Commission matter.   I’d hate to see how much the feds spent, the total number, on this case. Late yesterday afternoon, the three-judge federal court of appeals for the First Circuit issued a ruling overturning the convictions of John J. O’Brien, 59, who served as Commissioner of Probation, the highest position in the department, from 1998 to 2010, and two of O’Brien’s deputies, Elizabeth Tavar...

On December 1, both the Massachusetts House and Senate enacted a bill during informal sessions that would have made it harder for public school principals to fire custodians and other non-teaching employees for not doing their jobs right. Eight days later, Governor Charlie Baker returned the bill unsigned, an action known as a pocket veto, having accepted the argument that the bill would weaken the authority granted to school superintendents and principals under the state’s momentous, acclaimed Education Reform Act of 1993. Given the opposition of superintendents and principals to the bill -- House Bill 2319, An Act Relative to Protecting the Rights of Custodial and Other Non-Teaching Employees of School Districts -- I’m trying to figure out how the advocates for the bill got it passed during informal sessions.   Only “non-controversial” measures are supposed to be taken up during “informals.”   Under the rules and customs of the Massachusetts legislature, if only one legisl...

“In 2016, the political climate and social media within the United States have identified, if not created, what I would call a factual imperative.   There has never been a greater need to help citizens distinguish between that which is true and that which is false, and to do so with a sense of purpose and a sense of fury.   It’s why we do what we do.”           -John Henry, owner, The Boston Globe From age 23 to 33, I was a full-time newshound, working as a reporter, then as an editor at the Evening News & Mercury daily newspaper group in Malden, Medford and Melrose.   Before that, during my college years, I worked as a reporter at the Chelsea Record, a small but pugnacious daily.   I was a   Northeastern University co-op student/kid reporter in Chelsea. The respect I have for the craft of news gathering and the appreciation I have for the practitioners of that craft have only deepened through the years.   To sustain t...

The brain trust that runs Hampshire College in Amherst thought it would be a good idea to lower the American flag to half-mast on Wednesday, Nov. 9, the day after Trump’s victory, “as an expression of grief over the violent deaths being suffered in this country and globally.”   The college planned to raise the flag to its full height two days later, on Veterans Day.   After someone or some group took down the flag without permission on the night of Nov. 9 and burned it, the college’s board of trustees decided it would be nice to remove the flag altogether from public display on campus.   Then the president of the college, Jonathan Lash, called for an open-ended dialogue on how the flag symbolizes different things, some of them quite horrible, to different people.   Some Hampshire students, he noted, “grew up victims of racism and injustice” and are troubled by the flag because it is a “symbol of a system that has been repressive.”   That decision created a ...